Taste in the Age of AI

At the AutoScout24 UX Camp 2026 in Berlin, a 2.5 day design and research team offsite, I had the pleasure of giving a talk on “Taste in the age of AI”.

For most of our careers, the visible part of design was making the thing. We made the screen, the prototype, the campaign, the deck, the system. AI changes that balance. It makes many forms of production easier, faster, and cheaper.

But that does not make design less important. It changes where the difficulty lives. The hard part becomes knowing what to ask for, what to keep, what to reject, what to improve, and what should never have been made in the first place.

AI expands what we can make. Taste determines what is worth making.

The goal of my talk was to shed a light on “taste”, and make it feel less mysterious and more trainable. Not a personality trait. Not a vibe. A practical design capability.